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The Lone Horseman of the Sportspocalypse

By JONATHAN MAHLER June 2, 2011 4:01 pmJune 2, 2011 4:01 pm

The countdown for Grantland.com is on.

For those who haven’t heard, Grantland — the (unfortunate) name is an homage to the (overrated) sportswriter Grantland Rice — is a new Web site being created by ESPN and its star columnist Bill Simmons, whom I profiled for this Sunday’s magazine. During one of our conversations, Simmons described the site as a cross between two of his favorite publications, The National and Spy magazine. I wasn’t a reader of The National, a sports weekly that debuted in early 1990 and lasted all of 18 months, but I recently had occasion to flip through some old copies — solid sports analysis but nothing special (at least in the couple of dozen issues I saw). Spy, of course, was a different story: utterly original, insightful and hilarious.

But what Grantland truly represents is an attempt to leverage Simmons’s particular sensibility into a freestanding publication. Can this work? Simmons has certainly tapped into something with his column (and podcasts … and tweets … and books), but what he does — blending sports smarts with some pop culture and the kind of adolescent humor you’re likely to find in “The Hangover Part II” — is not easy. A lot will be riding, I think, on how ready Simmons is to throw himself into this, which will necessarily mean letting other divisions of his media empire lie fallow.

But the bigger question concerns ESPN: Will the company’s ambitions of global sports domination trump its willingness to give Simmons the room he’ll need to create something worth reading? The early signs are not entirely encouraging. Last month, one of Grantland’s prospective employees, a talented young writer named Tommy Craggs, had his candidacy put on hold after he mocked ESPN’s in-house blog on Deadspin. Craggs subsequently withdrew his name from consideration for the job. He told me this morning he was worried that Grantland will ultimately be more ESPN than Simmons. The site is slated to go live next week. Just hours ago Simmons tweeted: “Grantland.com launches on June 8th at noon. Could not be more excited — the grunt work is out of the way, now the fun part starts.” We’ll soon see if Craggs’s hunch is right and if Simmons’s enthusiasm lasts.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…